Don’t Say “Calm Down”: How to Train Cops On How to Interact With People With Mental Illness

According to Scotty Turner, this is the most useless phrase an officer can say when dealing with someone who is mentally disturbed.

“It tells the person that they aren’t worth listening to,” he writes. “… It tells the person that their concerns aren’t valid.”

In role playing exercises, Turner, the community education director for the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)-DuPage County, has police replace the phrase with one that gives the person options—for instance, “You can sit down and stop yelling, or we will need to physically escort you from the building.”

His goal is to help cops avoid violent or demeaning confrontations, and get people the treatment they need. A recent study from the LAPD found that of the 38 individuals shot by the department last year, almost half had documented signs of mental illness. Mental health advocates have called for more de-escalation training for officers that focus on slowing down volatile situations.

“Unless cops know about mental illness in the first place, then they have no tools to change what they’re doing,” Turner writes.

Here are some highlights from the AMA.

We can’t expect police officers to become certified psychologists, so what’s the goal for this type of training?